Quote

Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.

Thornton Wilder

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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Principles
Enormous
Accompanied
Beauty
Necessarily
Concerning
Water
Critics
Governed
Force
Nine
Critic
Truth
Criticism
Selection
Tenths
Every
General
Sentence
Skeleton
Like
Activity
Rejection
Iceberg
Writer
Sentences
Skeletons

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
Thornton Wilder
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Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
Thornton Wilder
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
Thornton Wilder
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
Thornton Wilder
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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
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The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
Thornton Wilder
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One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
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Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.
Thornton Wilder
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I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
Thornton Wilder
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Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
Thornton Wilder
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How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
Thornton Wilder
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We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton Wilder
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
Thornton Wilder